Twitter’s short video sharing service has become a haven for individual goal highlights and the Premier League has moved to shut the door on the practice due to the simple reason that it’s against the law to share copyrighted content on the social network.

"You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law,” Dan Johnson, director of communications at the Premier League, told BBC Newsbeat. "It's a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it, we're developing technologies like gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity."

Johnson admitted that it will ultimately make the Premier League sound like “killjoys” but that “we have to protect our intellectual property” that a number of companies have paid a huge amount to use.

Sky and BT paid £3 billion between them to show three seasons worth of live Premier League coverage and a separate deal was signed by The Sun and The Times to be able to screen highlights online – at a price.

Football fans can sign up for Sun+ for £8 a month and for that they get access to Premier League goals that the publication aims to have live within two minutes of the ball going in.

"It's important to underline that it's illegal to do this, we've obviously signed a very big deal with the Premier League to be a rights holder and to show it, we've got legal teams talking with them about what we can do,” added Dean Scoggina, deputy head of sport at The Sun.

Supporters can still view all the highlights for the price of a TV license on the BBC's Match of the Day programme every Saturday and only have to wait until Tuesday to see all of the goals via the company's BBC iPlayer service.